New term: workslop

2025-09-22 · Publisher : BetterUp Labs et Stanford Social Media Lab · Domain : Artificial Intelligence

Workslop is AI-generated work content that looks like good work but lacks substance, leaving the recipient to fix or redo it. The term comes from a Harvard Business Review article of September 2025.

### Definition **Workslop** (a blend of *work* and *slop*) is AI-generated work content that looks like a finished deliverable but adds nothing useful: hollow reports, generic slide decks, code that needs rewriting. The cost is shifted to the colleague who receives it. ### Origin The term appeared on September 22, 2025 in Harvard Business Review, under the title "AI-Generated 'Workslop' Is Destroying Productivity". Its authors, researchers from BetterUp Labs and the Stanford Social Media Lab (including Kate Niederhoffer and Jeffrey T. Hancock), define it as "AI generated work content that masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task." ### What the term covers - A survey of 1,150 full-time US employees: about 40% say they received workslop in the previous month. - Each instance takes nearly two hours on average to understand, fix or redo. - Recipients then see the sender as less reliable, less capable and less trustworthy. ### Criticism and limits The figures come from a self-reported survey run by a coaching company, which calls for caution. The phenomenon is not unique to AI: hollow documents existed before; AI mostly lowers the cost of producing them. ### Key takeaway Workslop is a reminder that AI adoption is not measured by output volume. Without review and quality standards, one employee's apparent gain becomes a loss for the whole team.

Tags : Vocabulaire, Qualité, Productivité, Travail